Take a Bite of My Heart Tonight
by carved in the sand
Summary: It's sick, the games they play, but she let him play them regardless- hitsukarin


**_{it's sick, the games they play}_**

It's the beginning of her junior year when it happens. The night of her first game of the season ended in victory and an uncontrollable high that flooded through her veins. Her euphoria could not be explained. She pins him against his car and kisses bruises into his pale lips. The fall wind whips their hair wildly, sweeping away the heat from her skin and all thoughts of their friendship and his girlfriend.

They set up rules - nothing more than physical. And their friendship would not be affected.

She could see it in his smirk, the challenge that he's taking up.

With a hammering heart, he drives her home, the car suffocating with everything she wants to shout at the top of her lungs. She would not lose. She wouldn't mess this up. No one would find out.

Or, at least, she'd be damned if he found out.

**_{call me careless, call me cruel}_**

Nonchalance is the challenge, something like friendship, except Toshiro's eyes will linger on the curve of her neck, her legs, the heaving of her chest when he picks her up from practice that day when her brother can't give her a ride.

There is much more hospitality, complacent, in his actions, and she takes them with greed.

They sit too closely at the small dinner table of her house while her father and sister ramble on without any of their input, his hand curving deviously around her hip. Karin ignores the dryness of her throat when she returns with her fingers drumming up and down his spine as feathery as possible when they walk away from the table. She shakes the word _intimate_ from her skull when Yuzu follows them with her eyes.

She bite his lip sharply, and leaves through her window with scratch marks, hickeys, and a split lip. The taste of of blood still remains on her tongue after she brushes her teeth before sleep.

Forcefully, the dark haired girl shakes the images of him grinning at her, shirtless with the blood staining his pale lips when he picks her up the next morning for school.

**_{darling, just look at what you do}_**

Darkness is her reprieve, where they'll steal away to impossibly high tree branches - not on a child's errand - and darkened closets during school, and always his room in that too-empty house with no one but himself and the strawberry blonde aunt that drinks away her sorrows. The echoes of their footsteps trying to fill the silence as best as they can with the whispering of skin. He'll never fail to leave bruises on her hips, breath harshly into her neck as he threads his fingers through her ink hair.

Karin likes when he's holding her too hard, like he wants to sink into her skin. Toshiro will press into her frame firmly, taking his slow, ragged breaths, as if drunk off of her scent.

In September, she watches him fall asleep, the heavy fluttering of his stark white lashes against his skin that she can just barely make out in the darkness. Karin presses her hand onto his chest, in the dark, still feel his pulse thundering from the sex.

He is soft and vulnerable then. She could leave, walk out of his bed and his door and his life with witnessing one of the rare moments of Hitsugaya Toshiro being vulnerable, leave his bed satisfied with the fluttering of his snowy lashes.

But she does not. She cannot move her legs out of sheer distaste, and it scares her, shooting fear straight through her spine.

Instead, She pulls up the covers over their bodies and wraps an arm around his shoulder before falling into slumber.

**_{i'll let you call me beautiful}_**

Envy is her downfall, her first mistake, as she walks in the halls to see him talking with his girlfriend Hinamori. Karin swiftly interrupts them, wearing sweats and her black hair tied up messily into a bun, swelling with confidence. The pair see her walk up, and she ignores the way he's rolled up the sleeves of his school uniform shirt past his elbow, powerful forearms broadcast under his expanse of tanned skin.

She tosses her duffle bag at him unceremoniously just as she leans into him for a kiss, and reflexively he jerks away to catch it.

"Put that in the trunk. I'm gonna go to my locker," she says callously, not meeting Hinamori's eyes, yet already feeling her hard stare.

"You can't just-"

"I'll be there in five minutes," Karin calls as she jogs back down the hall. "I swear!"

The sudden angry, high-pitched whispers that echo around the barren hall make her smile.

**_{and it's a start - you're still playing with my head}_**

Emotion is her opponent, with the twists and turns of her unsure heart - _I'm too fucked up for it to ever work out_ - that she'll get lost in when she really tries to think outside of the game. She will never live up to Hinamori. She will never give all of herself to him, just as he wants, just as he'd give to her, because in the end she'll always put herself first. Snow drifts atop her midnight locks, decorating her head with white puffs of ice.

In winter, when Yuzu takes her along with her friends to ice skate at the Karakura rink, feeling like a different world. Christmas lights line the walls, giving the room life. Karin is shocked when he is there, of course invited by her sister, still as teasing as ever attempting to keep her from falling onto her face.

"You're honestly horrible," Toshiro says happily as he keeps her from falling for the thousandth time that night, keeping an arm around her waist as they drift along slowly.

"Of course, because it's so fucking easy to balance on a giant blade attached to a shoe. Of course," she spat back sarcastically. She shrieked with laughter when he pulled away from her, just holding onto one wrist, swinging her around on the ice.

It's everything she wants with him, Karin recognizes quietly as she spins. The air is bitterly cold against her cheeks, slapping them unceremoniously, or maybe as punishment. _You stupid girl, doing this to yourself, falling in love with this boy. You stupid girl._ Her heart unfolds as she watches him smile too honestly. Not just the sex, or the idiots in school knowing that he is _her's_, but the two of them spinning around on ice like they meant something.

Just ice skating together as it snows and the world looks sleepy covered in ice.

It's everything she'll never _have_, she recognizes quietly.

**_{you keep playing with my heart}_**

Longing will rest it's heavy weight on her shoulders, something like a cold blanket, like depression, black and sticky and growing, molding over her skin, in the dark, where he breathes laughter into her ear tiredly that night as they insult each other while making out after ice skating -_"I'm staying over to watch a movie, Yuzu! Don't wait up for me!" _- like she is his and he is her's and everything would be normal if she just stayed the night wrapped inside of his arms. But she cannot, and she cannot count the wrongs against Hinamori she's done, even if she counted every touch and kiss and quiet moment, every second they'd spent like _this_.

Karin felt her self slipping, already losing, but couldn't find it in herself to care.

She pulls away from him for air, and it struck dumb by the brilliance of his eyes. It's unfair, she quietly muses. The way he can just look at her too closely and her entire body wants to melt into his arms. They sparkle at her mischievously, a quirk in his brow. "Are we ever going to get to that movie?"

"That is if I _let_ you," Karin murmurs, pressing her forehead against his.

"Then by all means, don't let me out of your grasp tonight."

"Didn't plan on it, obviously."

His laughter splintered her heart.

**_{i'll never be able to have you}_**

Bitterness is her reward_._ He is blindly uncaring and indifferent when she stops playing with him, begins to finally step out of their rules and boundaries when she finds the excuses to keep away from him, because she is tired and aching in strange ways, as if she's playing soccer with her heart, battering and bruising it to a bloody pulp.

He is blindly uncaring and indifferent when she attempts to engage him in the halls as friendly, less than the usual reluctant friendship and bitter rivalry that they've always had. Karin would have rather been stabbed - it would have hurt less than to see his eyes go so cold after the warmth she's seen them burn with. Liquid to ice. She steps away from him, in more ways than one, and quits the game. She doesn't talk to him in class, in the halls any longer, and her hatred was palpable.

Why did she try to delude herself like this?

He is bitter too, though. Bile sour at the back of his tongue when she doesn't take his rides home anymore, taking the walks even in thirty degree weather, pouring rain, and it pisses him off.

**_{you've done nothing but cause me pain}_**

Nostalgia is a side affect, reminiscing over their past. She can remember the first time she realized she loved him when she saw him the summer after eighth grade, him already a freshman, silent among her brother's crew of older friends in the living room. It had been two years since they spent all that time playing soccer in middle school, the shortest, best rivalry she could have ever asked for. He was nothing but a scowl on a pretty face.

But when he'd saw her, his grin was warm and fierce and he's only ever looked at her that way, with that smile.

It makes her sick, the games she lets him play with her heart.

**_{and i knew, i knew}_**

Victory is blurry and undecided on the night of prom when he's supposed to be inside dancing with Hinamori. Toshiro's hand finds it's way to her thigh when they kiss in his car late at night, dress pooling around her waist as he presses her flush against him in the front seat straddling him. This dress is stupid, these shoes are stupid, and this dance is stupid, yet she only let her friends drag her along because she knew he'd be forced to come.

Karin kisses all her bitterness into his lips, pulling his bottom lip between her teeth and biting down none too gently. He groans into her mouth hotly.

He pulls away from her suddenly, blinking the haze from his eyes. "Stop holding back," Toshiro says, frustration furrowing his brows.

Karin's eyes go wide. "What are you talking about?"

"I know you love me, Karin."

Her entire body freezes up, and the former heat burning at her skin disappears in an instant. The car is suddenly too dark, too suffocating, and she's become too close in all the wrong ways. "I'm not an idiot," he continues. "But I guess I am. I can't think of anything but you. I'm not sure what you're here for right now, since it's taken me an entire school year to realize all of this and break up with Hinamori. Honestly, you could do better."

"You broke up with-?"

"Last week. When I was still getting the silent treatment."

"Which you deserved," she snapped. "We're still playing a game, you know."

"Then you've won fantastically, then," Toshiro answered, giving her that grin again. Not a smirk, but not a smile either. Content. He looked at her contentedly, like even if they didn't fall together, his words would be enough for him. "Losing meant falling in love with you. And this my best failure."

Karin's arms tightened significantly around his neck, leaning in to kiss him because the words didn't feel right on her tongue just yet. "Let's be losers together, then."

**_{i just wanted you}_**

Kurosaki Karin has never done anything sweetly in her life - this she knows. But maybe she can make an exception.

Her hands reached to cradle his face as their lips press, trying to sear a thousand promises onto his lips.


End file.
